How a language encodes passive events affects how the middle semantics—the ascription of dispositions to a theme—morphosyntactically manifests in a language. This connection arises as both passives and middles are morphosyntactic manifestations of the functional head Voice, responsible for marking grammatical voice: middles and passives are substantiations of Voice[−D], with the demoted external argument. The systematic variations observed in middle sentences across languages boil down to how a language treats Voice and v. A Voice-splitting language posits Voice on top of v. This separate Voice is the locus for morphologically distinguishing actives from non-actives. Such a Voice-splitting language, thus, does not display the lability alternation in the middles. On the other hand, a Voice-bundling language lacks a separate functional head dedicated to grammatical Voice. It does not morphologically distinguish actives from non-actives, resulting in the lability alternation.
1. Introduction
2. Crosslinguistic Variations in Middles
3. Discussion
4. Concluding Remarks
References